Tableau & Power BI

Why there is no dedicated plugin#

Tableau's own extension paths for web data have been retired: Web Data Connector 2.x was removed in Tableau 2023.1, and WDC 3.0 is deprecated as well. Tableau's recommended successor is the REST API Connector from the Tableau Exchange — built and signed by Tableau, reading an HTTP GET endpoint. The platform provides exactly that endpoint instead of maintaining a plugin of its own.

1. Switching the feed on (administration)#

As shipped, the feed is off; every fetch is refused with 403, regardless of the caller's rights. Letting data out is a deliberate act — under Daten → BI-Anbindung (data → BI connectivity).

2. Authentication#

The feed accepts only the platform's normal bearer authentication: a Keycloak access token of the realm with audience agent. A token for a different audience is refused with 401. Two routes lead there:

• Bearer token — the analyst stores an access token in the connector. Short-lived, so it suits one-off or manually triggered extracts only.
• OAuth — recommended for scheduled refreshes. A dedicated public client for Tableau is created in the realm (standard flow, PKCE, the redirect URI documented by your Tableau version, plus an audience mapper to agent).

3. Prerequisites in Tableau#

1. 1

   Tableau 2023.3 or newer

2. 2

   Install the REST API Connector

   From the Tableau Exchange; place the .taco file in your installation's connectors directory.

3. 3

   Drop in the JDBC REST API driver

   The .jar goes into your platform's driver directory.

   Windows:  C:\Program Files\Tableau\Drivers
   macOS:    ~/Library/Tableau/Drivers
   Linux:    /opt/tableau/tableau_driver/jdbc

4. 4

   Restart Tableau

4. The data source URL#

The console builds the finished URL under BI-Anbindung → generate data source URL, with a copy button. It has this shape:

https://<host>/api/agent/bi/rows?catalog=<catalog>&schema=<schema>&table=<table>&limit=10000&orderBy=<column>

There is no SQL parameter, and that is deliberate. The feed builds the query itself from the named object, validated identifiers and numbers. If you need a computed analysis, store it as a metric or as a view in the lakehouse — then the policies apply there too.

orderBy is mandatory from the second page#

OFFSET without ORDER BY is not stable in Trino — as in any parallel engine — two queries may return the same rows in a different order. An extract spanning several pages could contain rows twice and lose others without any error surfacing. The feed therefore refuses offset > 0 without orderBy, answering 400 order_required rather than serving an unreliable page. The first page needs no sort key.

5. Setting up the connector#

6. Common error responses#

Power BI#

Power BI reads the same feed, but through a bundled Power Query connector. It handles paging, typing and sign-in over OAuth 2.0 with PKCE against Keycloak — scheduled refreshes through an on-premises data gateway are intended but have not yet been verified against Power BI. Without installing the connector, Web.Contents is the alternative.

Directly over JDBC or ODBC#

Alongside the feed there has been a second route since 0.71.0: direct SQL access to Trino over JDBC or ODBC, using your own Keycloak sign-in. Row and column policies apply unchanged. The access is opt-in and runs on a port of its own; a guide for Excel over native ODBC is included.

Worth knowing#

• Metrics and semantic views have been directly addressable since 0.20.0: instead of catalog, schema and table, metric is enough, optionally with dimension.
• Columns whose types Tableau does not know are omitted rather than guessed, and reported as unsupported in the schema.
• hasMore is derived from rowCount === limit, so the last page of an extract may come back empty once.